This book (in French except for the short English contribution by Laura Westra) collects the papers that were presented at the Annual Conference of the French Society for Environmental Law in December 2010. The contributions aim at answering a set of three questions: what is the content of environmental justice as a concept? Is environmental justice endorsed by positive law? What are the perspectives of environmental justice? The first part addresses the issue of equity as the source of environmental justice; the second part is devoted to the instruments of environmental justice, and particularly focuses on those instruments that address equity concerns. In the third part the focus lies on the actors of environmental justice and the relationship between environmental governance and equity. This part directly addresses the relationship between equity and legal norms. More particularly, the five contributions in this part cover the issues of legal norms' coordination, evaluation, validity, and decision-making processes. The fourth and last part questions the realizability of environmental justice at the international level. Because of de facto inequalities, the international society is a priori an ideal field to question, apply, and identify perspectives for environmental justice.
As with any collection of conference papers (and despite the guarantee of quality offered by the French Society for Environmental Law) one may wonder about the added value of such a book. Indeed, there exists already a wealth of literature that covers issues of environmental justice, equity, and related concepts (for example, responsibilities towards future generations and sustainable development). However, this book clearly adds to this literature. �